BITCOIN IS ‘A DE-RISK ASSET’

The Bitcoin market has once again turned bullish with the leading cryptocurrency retaking a position above $7,000. According to one cryptocurrency expert, the long-term upside for the first and foremost cryptocurrency is massive, and may entice gold investors to leave the precious metal for what some refer to as “digital gold.”

Gold today has around $7 trillion outstanding. If you take, say, 5 to 10 percent — I’ll let everyone do the math — bitcoin has upside.

Bitcoin’s market capitalization currently sits around $128 billion. As noted by Gurbacs, a mere 10 percent shift from gold into bitcoin $7331.33 +0.04% would more than triple the gold standard of cryptocurrency’s market cap. He explained:

Bitcoin is used as digital gold today. It’s a de-risk asset. Basically if someone wants to outlay systematic risk, then one would go to access gold or digital gold.

For such a move to happen, the market for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies needs to mature and entice more institutional investment — something many in the space believe is an inevitability. Gurbacs counts himself among those believers, stating:

We believe that there is sufficient liquidity. We believe there is pricing benchmarks. We believe there is a way to integrate bitcoin into the financial ecosystem that we are used to for ETFs, stocks, bonds and commodities.

Bitcoin has already replaced gold as the go-to means for transferring wealth in times of crisis or uncertainty. In May, Clem Chambers, CEO of ADVFN.com and author of Be Rich, The Game in Wall Street and Trading Cryptocurrencies: A Beginner’s Guide, noted:

You can’t head for the airport with gold bars these days, and opening a foreign bank account is a thankless task that can take months or never get done. A normal person sweating a war isn’t a billionaire with a private office, but in the old days they might have stashed a few thousand or even hundreds of thousands in gold if they thought the balloon was going up.

Today you’d stash it in Bitcoin and be safe in the knowledge that you could fly away on holiday somewhere safe for a few months and your stash would be as safe as the place your hid you private keys.

Earlier this year, the World Gold Council itself admitted that Bitcoin could “undermine the tools used by the Fed and other central banks to influence the economy.”